Category Archives: The news on TV

UK agrees to consider providing safe haven for Afghan journalists

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U-turn over those who worked for British media follows outcry from newspapers and broadcasters

The foreign secretary has agreed to consider allowing Afghan journalists who worked for the British to flee to the UK if their lives are endangered by the resurgence of the Taliban, after an outcry from a coalition of British newspapers and broadcasters.

Dominic Raab signalled the policy U-turn on Friday, saying he recognised the bravery of the Afghan journalists. A scheme that was set up to offer a safe haven to Afghans who worked with the British will be expanded to include those who worked as journalists, it was reported.

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Martin Bashir used ‘deceitful behaviour’ to secure Diana interview, report finds

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BBC chief Tim Davie apologises after investigation identified ‘clear failings’ in tactics used by journalist to secure interview

The BBC has been forced to make a humiliating apology after an investigation found that Martin Bashir used deceitful tactics that were later covered up by senior executives to secure his sensational 1995 interview with Diana, Princess of Wales.

The inquiry, conducted by the former supreme court judge John Dyson, was withering of both Bashir and the corporation’s former director general, Tony Hall, who was accused of overseeing a flawed and “woefully ineffective” internal probe into the issue.

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Can any fool read the news? Tim Dowling finds out

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The Autocue is loaded up to see if Jeremy Paxman was right to dismiss the art of TV newsreading

The words keep rising, white against a dark blue background, and I keep saying them, occasionally mispronouncing them. All the while I am conscious of the fact that somewhere behind the words there is a camera. Very soon I lose all sense of what I’m saying. I’m just reading on for dear life.

In March, Jeremy Paxman dismissed the art of newsreading as “an occupation for an articulated suit”, claiming that “any fool” could read an Autocue. Last week, the BBC presenter Reeta Chakrabarti took him to task. “I’ve written a lot of what I’m reading out,” she told the Radio Times. “Those aren’t someone else’s words.”

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Woody Allen denies claims in Allen v Farrow HBO documentary

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The film-maker and wife Soon-Yi Previn claim film is ‘hatchet job riddled with falsehoods’ on abuse allegations

Woody Allen has rebutted renewed allegations, in the HBO documentary Allen v Farrow, that he sexually assaulted his daughter Dylan in 1992, calling the series “a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”.

In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, said that film-makers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick had “spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”.

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Rivals plan Fox News-style opinionated TV station in UK

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Groups pitching to perceived desire for alternative output as trust in BBC falls

Rival efforts are under way to launch a Fox News-style opinionated current affairs TV station in Britain to counter the BBC.

One group is promising a news channel “distinctly different from the out-of-touch incumbents” and has already been awarded a licence to broadcast by the media regulator, Ofcom, under the name “GB News”. Its founder has said the BBC is a “disgrace” that “is bad for Britain on so many levels” and “needs to be broken up”.

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Tiger King’s Carole Baskin handed control of Joe Exotic’s zoo

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Baskin, whose rivalry with Exotic was documented in the Netflix hit, is now the owner of the Oklahoma premises following court proceedings

Beleaguered zoo owner Joe Exotic, subject of Netflix’s hit documentary series Tiger King, has now suffered the indignity of rival Carole Baskin gaining control of what was once his zoo. Baskin, a self-styled conservationist and owner of the Big Cat Rescue facility in Hillsborough County, Florida, has been given control of the Wynnewood, Oklahoma premises by courts, after Exotic failed to pay her $1m in copyright and trademark suits.

Exotic – real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage – is currently in prison, having been found guilty of 17 counts of animal abuse and a murder-for-hire plot against Baskin, and sentenced to 22 years.

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63 Up review – documentary marvel makes all other reality TV look trivial

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Michael Apted’s groundbreaking seven-yearly series returns, seeming more dreamlike than ever as it follows its subjects into retirement and beyond

Though Michael Apted’s groundbreaking documentary series Up remains resolutely focused on the reality of its (originally 14) subjects’ lives, the experience of watching the programmes is becoming strangely more dreamlike with age.

Related: 56 Up: 'It's like having another family'

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Guardian spurs media outlets to consider stronger climate language

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Use of terms ‘climate crisis’ and ‘global heating’ prompts reviews in other newsrooms

The Guardian’s decision to alter its style guide to better convey the environmental crises unfolding around the world has prompted some other media outlets to reconsider the terms they use in their own coverage.

After the Guardian announced it would now routinely use the words “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” instead of “climate change”, a memo was sent by the standards editor of CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, to staff acknowledging that a “recent shift in style at the British newspaper the Guardian has prompted requests to review the language we use in global warming coverage”.

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Jeremy Hunt: Russian TV station a ‘weapon of disinformation’

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Foreign secretary’s press freedom day speech ramps up British assault on RT

Foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt will on Thursday declare the Russian government-owned TV station RT to be a “weapon of disinformation” in a speech to mark World Press Freedom Day.

The comments, to an audience in Ethiopia, mark an escalation of a British ministerial assault on the standards of the Russian broadcaster, originally known as Russia Today, which had faced repeated investigations into its output by the media regulator Ofcom.

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Screen queens: the funny, fearless women who revolutionised TV

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Phoebe Waller-Bridge exploded into our living rooms with Fleabag, her vicious comedy about an angry, awkward woman. As it returns, Guardian writers pick their TV heroines

Who gets to be the bitch?

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